From Napkin to Production

After a night out with the guys, burning through five bar-napkin sketches, the perfect product idea is born. Or is it? How do you determine if your idea is worthwhile and worth pursing?

A common mistake that entrepreneurs, and even large medical-device companies, tend to make is that they start with an idea that propels them essentially to the middle of the product development process.

For example, a device manufacturer realized a need in the market for an improved version of its device. One of their engineers had an idea, and he spent six months engineering a prototype. At that point, he realized it needed a better-looking handle, so he decided to employ some design.

The design team realized there were several better ways to create a device to meet the need, and they prototyped a version to show to the manufacturer. At that point the manufacturer said, “That seems great, but we have six months of engineering expenditure on what we already have, and we can't depart from that now.”

That device never made it to market.

When critical preliminary steps are skipped, they can’t be magically introduced at a later stage. In this case, usability research, criteria definition, and ideation exploration activities had been skipped over, and the group went straight to engineering to test an early concept. It can be painful to do the development process over if you skip steps.

Most entrepreneurs we work with are very passionate about their ideas. They demonstrate an uncommon stick-to-itiveness that is important to make their idea reality. But don't fall in love with your own idea.

It pays to investigate the idea. Try to come up with as many different product solutions as possible. Then evaluate the various solutions, even with actual users, to get it down to the best one. A lot of work must occur before you get to that one particular concept.

Design-driven thinking forces you to think about many important factors before leaping into engineering the details of one concept. With a design-driven mentality, you will be not only considering defining the need, but also defining the needs surrounding the need. This type of thinking requires investigation into the world that the user lives in, talking to users, finding pain points, and converting those issues into need statements. It involves producing design criteria from those need statements, and letting the creative team come up with as many concepts as possible to fulfill those criteria.

Many people understand when they have discovered a legitimate need. How you solve that need takes a lot more investigation into the nuances of the needs surrounding the need.

If you follow a process with a design-driven mentality and you have a good holistic creative team, some wonderful magic can arise from their efforts leading to innovative solutions you would have never thought of otherwise.

Tom Kramer is passionate about making ideas become reality. You can either find him at Kablooe Design, helping his customers develop the latest and greatest products, or speaking at various industry events on the topics of innovation and optimizing the product development process.

Tom- you have summarized great points that need to be reiterated again and again. Not only to a small teams working on entrepreneurial concepts, but even to well establish Large-Cap firms who have been thru the process multiple times. Frequently, new managers, trying to outshine their predecessors for the glory of the spotlight, are eager to skip critical steps in interest of "The Schedule". Speaking from experience, the last (4) major electronics projects I've developed have all failed to ship, either because Marketing pushed thru a half-baked idea which didn't sell, or because Program Management's scheduling rushed past critical steps, and the end result failed. There are dozens of opportunities to fail, and only a disciplined, experienced team can navigate them all successfully.

I worked at a company where one of the engineers believed that a good design review meeting was one that left 'blood on the floor'. He also believed that you should not be in love with your design, or this review could be crushing to your ego. Upper Management was one of the owners, whose main criteria was that whoever shouted loudest was right. A lot of time and money were wasted on far-fetched ideas that ought to have been discarded.

I worked for a place where the Design Reviews reminded you of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"; someone had to be stoned to death. Rather than discussing what went right or wrong with the project, and maybe sharing resources for the next project, the review simply berated and bullied the engineers involved in the project with screaming insults and obscenities. The reviews were so brutal, it was the only reason why I left an otherwise enjoyable company.

"When critical preliminary steps are skipped, they can't be magically introduced at a later stage. In this case, usability research, criteria definition, and ideation exploration activities had been skipped over, and the group went straight to engineering to test an early concept. It can be painful to do the development process over if you skip steps."

Tom, now a day's technologies are moving/changing at a fast phase, so there won't be enough time to hang around for either market study or requirement gathering. So companies would prefer to complete all the cycles within a short span of time and to productize the technology

In the Dilbertesque world we work in minimizing risk doesn't pay. Say a market niche opens and half a dozen companies start developing a product for it. Company O uses an orderly design process minimizing risk at all steps and eventually comes up with a good product. Unfortunately the other companies rush their development processes and take extreme risks by cutting corners. Most of these companies products fail. But it is likely one or two of the risky programs will succeed and beat company O to market.

Wait a minute now. Design discipline is always couched on what is known at the moment. Novelty evolves from an inspired thought, not always conditioned by market forces nor by the profit motive...history should have taught us that.

What if the innovator is both designer AND engineer, surely there is no need to go the route suggested by Tom since the prototype will be more than good enough?...Just thoughts

What we found worked very well has been to have an idea and then share it with a group of (very qualified) people who are able to both identify problems and provide both additional insight and valid solutions. So we would talk for a couple of hours in the morning and then a couple more hours later that day. At this point we would have a fairly detailed description which we would pass on to both marketing and sales people. The following week we would get feedback, and then discuss just what changes were needed or not needed.

The big difference is that we were all interested in having a product that was successful, since that was not only an ego reward, but also would be resulting in a financial reward. OUr management would routinely reward successes, which did have a quite positive effect on moral. And all of us understood that the project success depended on all of it working well, rather than empire protection.

So the short explanation is that success comes from having a very good team working togather as a very good team.

Practically all electronic devices today contain metals that may
be coming from conflict-ravaged African countries. And political pressures will increasingly influence how these minerals are sourced and used in products.

Design for manufacturing (DFM) in mold production means that mold designers evaluate the manufacturability of their molds in the early stage of mold development by collecting all relevant information and applying it to their designs. They also have to consider many other factors, including flow balance, structural stress, and assembly tolerance, in order to ensure successful molding production.

Some adhesives provide strong structural bonds but take hours to fixture and attain handling strength. The technologies that offer the fastest cure do not bear loads or withstand stresses. A new class of adhesives aims to make both stick.

Focus on Fundamentals consists of 45-minute on-line classes that cover a host of technologies. You learn without leaving the comfort of your desk. All classes are taught by subject-matter experts and all are archived. So if you can't attend live, attend at your convenience.